Senior Product Manager
Haddington Dynamics (part of Ocado Group plc.) is an advanced research and development company applying cutting-edge reconfigurable supercomputing technology to low-cost, ultra-precision motion control for robotics, 3D printing, and automation.
Haddington's innovation in the low-cost robotics space as well as our deep knowledge of additive manufacturing have produced our family of purpose-built 5-axis robots that are fully trainable and human-safe. We leverage accessible, high-level languages for applications including 3D Printing, PCBA, and our current focus: merchandise pick and place. Our current FPGA platform processes 2M measurements per second, enabling 50 nm resolution, 50 μm repeatability, and real-time force feedback. The processing speed and resolution, combined with Haddington's haptic algorithms, make the robot intrinsically human-safe and capable of manual training.
Haddington is located in Las Vegas, Nevada, and is part of the UK-based Ocado Group plc.
About this role:
The main purpose of the Senior Product Manager role is to work directly with one or more of our development teams to envision the future of our Robotics solutions, which includes bespoke Robotics Arms, robotics, control software, data pipelines, user facing applications and simulation software. You will work side-by-side with an Engineering Team Lead, being jointly accountable for the delivery of your products. You will be required to build up and maintain a healthy level of trust and collaboration with your engineering counterpart, respecting the boundaries of your individual roles and responsibilities.
Our environment is one of agile development with a focused approach to constant delivery of high value solutions and the Product Manager role is at the core of the agile development methodology. This includes defining and managing the product backlog, benefit analysis, minimum viable product, prioritisation, acceptance criteria and reviewing completed work. Having a learning mindset and being able to understand user requirements, or perform trials and experiments to further understand user behaviour is also an expected part of the product manager role.
Due to the highly technical environment in which our Robotics is developed, you must be technically competent to be able to understand the systems, be able to prioritise development and work closely with business users and developers to decide product direction. You must be comfortable allowing the development teams to come up with the solutions whilst being their knowledge base and proxy for the business.
The Ocado Robotics team will act as a ‘centre of excellence' driving forward Ocado Technologies Robotic Arm capabilities, spanning multiple use cases across different industries. We're looking for ambitious, creative problem-solvers who can challenge convention and make an impact.
What you'll do:
Leading & Influencing
- Partners with Engineering Team Lead(s) and acts as the go-to person for particular product areas covered by the teams
- Establishes product alignment within Technology being the voice of the vision/strategy/priorities within the division
- Providing deep expertise or subject matter expertise in relevant product domain or product areas and able to balance priorities across these
- Role models behaviours and applies Ocado Technology principles in day to day work
- Provides mentorship and coaching for others in Product craft and domain, across the organisation
- Evangelises customer needs in a compelling way to a variety of audiences
- Excellent decision making with clear rationale, using appropriate tools for the scenario to make timely decisions
Product Knowledge
- Go-to expert across their product area and can explain how this fits into the broader picture
- Champions the product vision & ensures the plan is in line with vision and goals and continues to be fit for purpose throughout roadmap delivery
- Demonstrates a depth of expertise or is a subject matter expert within a product domain based on a sound understanding of the platform and capability requirements
- Demonstrates a sound understanding of the technology that the team are working on & is able to act as a proxy for other stakeholders, where technical expertise is not required
- Engages stakeholders effectively to gather user feedback to continuously refine the product roadmap
- Defines scope & prioritises stories to maximise business value using products
Insight & Innovation
- Actively seeks out opportunities for incremental value in achieving product goal commitments
- Proactively identifies opportunities to continuously improve realisation processes with other PMS and policies that govern it
- Monitors progress, looking for ways to improve the product & make adjustments based on strategic goals
- Contributes to documentation that is shared with relevant stakeholders as new features are developed and released
- Proactively shares product knowledge, insight and tools with other Ocado Technology
- Maintains an appropriate level of skills and knowledge to continue delivering leading products
- Growing Ocado platform competence through internal knowledge sharing and representing Ocado expertise externally
Problem Solving
- Leverages multiple sources of information to analyse user, system, and customer behaviour to diagnose and form clear recommendations
- Evangelises and embeds best practices in tracking, analysis, and data-driven problem solving
- Drives through issues and ambiguity with a structured and facilitative approach
- Supports less experienced colleagues across the broader organisation in obtaining and interpreting data to create insights and solve problems
Planning, Delivery & Validation
- Shares accountability with the Engineering Team Lead to drive the team towards realising defined goals
- Applies fit-for-purpose agile processes, escalating and removing obstacles in workflow wherever required
- Maintains a list of work to be done and its order of priority for delivery purposes at an appropriate level of granularity
- Manages expectations within Technology for the rate of delivery required to achieve our platform goals, quick to identify opportunities to increase delivery in a sustainable way
- Collaborates with other product people to effectively schedule work between teams to minimise lead time of delivering value
- Proactively identifies risks and challenges within their product area and takes appropriate actions to mitigate them
Stakeholder Management & Collaboration
- Applies strong emotional intelligence when working with other teams and departments to manage interdependencies between platforms and products effectively
- Builds strong relationships with stakeholders - establishing methods for getting user driven feedback
- Provides deep expertise and articulates complex concepts in a way that end-users can follow and understand
- Forms close working relationships with peers and key stakeholders, creating an environment of open collaboration - with a key focus on collaborating effectively with senior stakeholders across the business
- Facilitates and works closely with teams in estimation and review sessions, challenging appropriately to meet product goals and achieve product vision
- Works closely with UX teams to ensure product design is focused around usability and quality
What you'll bring:
Mindset
- Can-do self starter attitude in a fast-paced, complex and often ambiguous environment
- Strong bias for action and impatience for improvement
- Commercially-aware and user-focused - ability to understand needs and identify priorities to unlock value through analytics
- Interest in and curiosity about Robotics
- Driving force behind the product
- Constant need to ensure how the product fits into the wider picture
Experience
- Relevant retail technology experience
- Experience with managing products built by engineering teams
- Experience as Product Owner/Manager
- Ability to work in a team effectively and / or work autonomously, dealing well with uncertainty
- Knowledge of working with multiple functional areas, including product management, engineering, UX/UI, Analytics
- Proven ability to plan, prioritise, manage, track and deliver on commitments
- Ability to handle multiple competing priorities in a fast-paced environment
- Defining product roadmaps, building collaboratively with design and engineering peers, and shipping at scale
- Capture, documentation and communication of requirements to support product realisation
- Experience with hardware product development along with scaling up products
- Experience working across a multi-disciplinary organisation
You may be asked to perform tasks as required by management deemed as a reasonable request. This job description is a summary of the typical functions of the role, not an exhaustive or comprehensive list of possible role responsibilities, tasks and duties and is subject to review. The responsibilities, tasks and duties of the job holder might differ from those outlined in the job description and other duties, as assigned, might form part of the job.